EU starts ambitious machine translation project for all EU languages

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New European project develops automatic translation systems for all official languages of the EU using best available technologies

A press release from the German University Saarbrücken informs about EU plans to develop a machine translation system capable to translate all 23 languages.

Despite growing "legion of translators", the press release reads, "the general trend towards specialization, the demand on the competence of specialized translators also increases. This leads to a general increase in the cost of a good quality translation. The European Commission cannot, for example, send technical and legal translations among the languages of the European Union to the Philippines, India or other low-wage countries."

An new EU-funded project, called EuroMatrix, now aims at technological breakthroughs in automatic translation in order to combat the rising costs of the increasingly multilingual European society. New combinations of the best currently available methods for rule-based and statistical translation are to be tested. Additionally, the question of how statistical translation systems can be improved by linguistic methods will be investigated. The ambitious aim is to develop and test translation systems for the 23 official languages of the European Union. An important part of the project is also the organization of competitions among the best translation systems, to which all research centers and firms from Europe and other parts of the world are to be invited to participate. It will naturally not be possible to focus equally on each language pair, but a practical result of the project is to be a continuously updated assessment of the technological state for each language. This overview in the form of a large tabular matrix has given the project its name.

The project is coordinated by Professor Hans Uszkoreit at Saarland University. Dr. Philipp Koehn from the University of Edinburgh is serving as technical/scientific coordinator of the project. Other partners include internationally renowned research groups at Charles University in Prague lead by Prof Jan Hajic and the Evaluation Center CELCT in Trento under the direction of Prof. Amadeus Cappelli.

The partnership with representatives of industry is important for the success of the project: the German firm GroupWare AG is bringing their LOGOS system into the project, LOGOS being one of the largest and most important commercial translation systems, which was made available the year before last in an Open-Source version. The firm Morphologic in Budapest has developed digital dictionaries for many European languages and has its own translation technology.

The project has recently kicked off and is planned for 30 months at a cost of 2.5 million Euros.

source: IDW